Category: Running
Running as Equalizer?
Top o' the Stack.
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Malcolm Pollack comments:
I liked your brief post on running-as-equalizer, and how stubbornly our natural inequalities will always dash our hope of sweeping them under the rug. ("Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.")There's even another natural inequality you didn't touch on, namely the difference between those who have the fiber to get off their asses to go running in the first place, and those who won't – between those who do, and don't, have the will and wisdom to suffer consciously to improve their future selves.That, in my (insufficiently) humble opinion, is likely the most important inequality of all.
A stimulating comment. Now for some commentary on the comment.
A. Life is hierarchical by any measure in all dimensions including physical, mental, moral, and spiritual. We are not equal as individuals. And the same goes for groups. The 'woke' attempt to enforce 'equity' is bound to fail. There will never be equality of outcome. Merit will inevitably find a way of asserting itself. In the short term, the institutionalized assault on merit will be disastrous for the vast majority while profiting the oligarchic enforcers of 'equity.' In the long term, the enforcers too will suffer. For as Malcolm, points out, "reality doesn't go away."
Not only is the attempt to enforce 'equity' bound to fail, it cannot count as a value in any sound value hierarchy. For 'equity' is unjust.
Note also that the enforcement of 'equity' is selective: Is there 'equity' in professional sports? For that matter, are professional sports the home of 'diversity' and 'inclusion'? The questions answer themselves. In the NBA and the NFL qualifications matter. Real qualifications, not 'woke qualifications.' No DEI there! Examples of 'woke qualifications' include being black, being female, and being lesbian as in the case of the current presidential press secretary. The point is not that being black, being female, and being lesbian, whether taken singly or 'intersectionally,' should disqualify anyone from a government job; the point is that they cannot count — to a sane and reasonable person — as qualifications sans phrase.
Equity' is (or was) a perfectly good word that leftists have hijacked and re-defined to mean equality of outcome/result. Linguistic hijacking has proven to be an effective leftist tactic. Leftists are subversive of right reason and natural order and the mother of all subversion is the subversion of language. Hence the wokester predilection for Orwellianisms, e.g., "Abortion is health care."
B. In Malcolm's concluding sentence he alludes to humility and the questions it raises in the present context. He suggests that he himself is insufficiently humble. Is humility then something good? I was put in mind of a couple of lines from a poem by Goethe:
This is not easy to translate, but the thought is that only the worthless are modest; the good celebrate the deed. The good are not humble, but accomplished; they are made happy by and celebrate their accomplishments. The couplet has a Nietzschean, and thus anti-Christian flavor. Here political theology enters the picture.
Suppose the Christian God exists. Then we all are equal, and not just in the eyes of the law, or by abstraction from our positions in the various hierarchies mentioned above, or via some such conceit as John Rawls' Original Position behind the Veil of Ignorance. We are equal not just de jure but de facto. We are equal in fact as sons and daughters of one and the same eternal Father. The fact is not empirical but metaphysical. The equality is a function of the infinite distance between the all-perfect God and mortal man with his manifold imperfections. The natural hierarchies that so impress us here below are nothing to God: all the empirical differences of physical prowess, IQ, etc. shrink to nothing from the divine point of view.
One unavoidable question is whether the political equality of persons can be maintained without a theological foundation. Suppose there is no Judeo-Christian God. What could possibly support the manifestly anti-empirical belief in equality? After all, it is a plain fact that we are not equal in the ways mentioned above. If reality is exhausted by the natural (space-time and its material contents) and is thus in principle empirically accessible 'all the way down and up,' then what possible basis could belief in equality of person have? What would make this belief non-illusory?
I would say that if you are not an anti-wokester, if you do not reject the DEI agenda and all the depredatory absurdities that follow in its train, such as the assault on merit, then you are not sane and reasonable. Does it follow that the anti-wokester who is an atheist and a naturalist must also be a rejector of equality in all its senses? To specify and sharpen the question: Is there any rational justification, on the assumption of atheism and naturalism, for holding, as I in fact do, that slavery is a grave moral evil?
ComBox now open.
A Quest for Transcendence Gone Wrong
We are spiritual animals in need of spiritual transcendence. It is an illusion of the age to suppose that the transcendence we need can be found by bodily means.
Distance running has repaid me richly for the hours and years I devoted to it. In my late twenties I got pretty good at it and I experienced those unbelievable highs that, wonderful as they are, are but simulacra of the flights of the spirit. I had the sense not to seek transcendence in the wrong places. And the sense not to abuse the mortal vehicle. Urinating blood after training runs and trashing my immune system by marathon training convinced me to take it easy on old fratello asino.
He who pushes too hard invites a premature exit from the wheel of samsara. This from The Wisdom of Running a 2,189 Mile Marathon:
To hear Jurek tell it, forcing himself to the limit is purifying and transformational. “Though man’s soul finds solace in natural beauty, it is forged in the fire of pain,” he writes. But listen closely, and bodily transcendence is not exactly grist for motivational posters. Jurek’s pages are haunted by comrades who didn’t make it through the fire unscathed. He was joined for part of the trail by Aron Ralston, the hiker famous for amputating his own arm to free himself from a boulder. Jurek’s friend Dean Potter, a legendary climber and base jumper, died in a wing-suit accident days before Jurek began his trek. “I had known ultrarunners to finish races as their kidneys were shutting down and they were losing control of their bowels,” Jurek reports. He recalls a runner who fought through debilitating headaches to finish a 100-mile race and then died of a brain aneurysm.
Old Mountaineers and Bold Mountaineers
I'm no climber, but I love walking in the mountains. On a solo backpacking adventure in the magnificent Sierra Nevada some years back I overheard a snatch of conversation:
There are old mountaineers, and there are bold mountaineers, but there are no old bold mountaineers.
Ueli Steck, the great Swiss climber, is dead at 40, having fallen near Everest.
I have repeatedly asked myself, why I do this. The answer is pretty simple: because I want to do it and because I like it. I don’t like being restricted. When I climb, I feel free and unrestricted; away from any social commitments. This is what I am looking for.
I have a better answer. Steck climbed because he was very, very good at it, and we humans love doing what we are good at. Freedom from social commitments can be had in far less perilous ways.
I am reminded of something the great marathoner Bill Rodgers once said when asked why he ran and won 26.2 mile races at a blistering sub-five-minute-per-mile pace. "I like to be be fit." (I quote from memory) But of course one can be very fit indeed without running such a punishing distance at such a punishing pace.
On This Date 31 Years Ago and 50 Years Ago: Jim Fixx and Bob Dylan
It was 31 years ago today, during a training run. Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest. He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart. It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years. I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf. It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket. I read it when it first came out. Do I hear $1000? Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.
The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.
See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre. And here for something on George Sheehan. Now for some 'running' tunes.
Spencer Davis Group, Keep on Running
Jackson Browne, Running on Empty
Eagles, The Long Run
Beatles, Run for Your Life
Del Shannon, Runaway. Charles Weedon Westover was born 30 December 1934 and is best known for his 1961 #1 hit, "Runaway." Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California. Following his death, the Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway".
Bob Dylan, If Dogs Run Free
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run
Johnny Preston, Running Bear
Dion DiMucci, Runaround Sue
Roy Orbison, Running Scared
Crystals, They Do Run Run
Bob Dylan
Today, 20 July, is not only the 31th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 50th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. Wikipedia:
The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it. Springsteen described the moment during his speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and also assessed the long-term significance of "Like a Rolling Stone":
The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind … The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "[66][67]
Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful … He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further."[68] Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else …' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."[68] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovative quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling Stone'".[69]
Your humble correspondent was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California, when the song came on the radio. It was like nothing else on the radio in those days of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. It 'blew my mind.' What is THAT? And WHO is that? I had been very vaguely aware of some B. Dylan as the writer of PPM's Don't Think Twice. I pronounced the name like 'Dial in.' That memorable summer of '65 I became a Dylan fanatic, researching him at the library and buying all his records. The fanaticism faded with the '60s. But while no longer a fanatic, I remain a fan, 50 years later.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Jim Fixx Remembered
It was 30 years ago tomorrow, during a training run. Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest. He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart. It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years. I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf. It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket. I read it when it first came out. Do I hear $1000? Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.
The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.
See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre. And here for something on George Sheehan. Now for some 'running' tunes.
Spencer Davis Group, Keep on Running
Jackson Browne, Running on Empty
Eagles, The Long Run
Beatles, Run for Your Life
Del Shannon, Runaway. Charles Weedon Westover was born 30 December 1934 and is best known for his 1961 #1 hit, "Runaway." Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California. Following his death, the Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway".
Bob Dylan, If Dogs Run Free
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run
Johnny Preston, Running Bear
Dion DiMucci, Runaround Sue
Roy Orbison, Running Scared
Crystals, They Do Run Run
Addendum (7/20)
I should have mentioned it last night. Today, 20 July, is not only the 30th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 49th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. Wikipedia:
The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it. Springsteen described the moment during his speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and also assessed the long-term significance of "Like a Rolling Stone":
The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind … The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "[66][67]
Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful … He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further."[68] Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else …' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."[68] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovative quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling Stone'".[69]
Your humble correspondent was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California, when the song came on the radio. It was like nothing else on the radio in those days of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. It 'blew my mind.' What is THAT? And WHO is that? I had been very vaguely aware of some B. Dylan as the writer of PPM's Don't Think Twice. I pronounced the name like 'Dial in.' That memorable summer of '65 I became a Dylan fanatic, researching him at the library and buying all his records. The fanaticism faded with the '60s. But while no longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.
Nun Run
Some in the habit of running run in a habit. The Poor Clares are sponsoring their 5th annual Desert Nun Run in Tempe on March 8th. Might be fun to run with a nun. And you can vote with your feet against the scumbaggers and bullies of the current administration.
The Poor Clares are the group of sisters who have been targeted by the lawless and corrupt thugs of the Obama administration. See here. Here is the Obamacare Anti-Conscience Mandate.
The Boston Marathon
Today is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the day of the annual running of the Boston Marathon. My mind drifts back to 1980 and Rosie Ruiz who 'won' that year.
Boston Billy, I see, has a book out. Here is a post of mine from four years ago on Rodgers. It includes a nice inspirational passage from George Sheehan. Remember him?
UPDATE (4/16)
Bill Rodgers comments on the bombing.
Tony H. e-mails: "I wonder if we can now expect Diane Feinstein to introduce a bill in the Senate to ban pressure cookers." I wouldn't put it past that idiot. A typical liberal, for her it is the weapon not the wielder that is the focus of attention.
We ought not not speculate about the identity of the perpetrator or perpetrators. Let the investigation proceed.
It’s a Running Argument
Dave Lull points us to The Too-Much-Running Myth Rises Again. Excerpt:
(1) One of the major pieces of evidence the group cites is a study that was presented at a conference over the summer. The WSJ description:
In a study involving 52,600 people followed for three decades, the runners in the group had a 19% lower death rate than nonrunners, according to the Heart editorial. But among the running cohort, those who ran a lot—more than 20 to 25 miles a week—lost that mortality advantage.
But here, from the actual abstract, is the part they never mention:
Cox regression was used to quantify the association between running and mortality after adjusting for baseline age, sex, examination year, body mass index, current smoking, heavy alcohol drinking, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, parental CVD, and levels of other physical activities.
What this means is that they used statistical methods to effectively "equalize" everyone's weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on. But this is absurd when you think about it. Why do we think running is good for health? In part because it plays a role in reducing weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on (for more details on how this distorts the results, including evidence from other studies on how these statistical tricks hide real health benefits from much higher amounts of running, see my earlier blog entry). They're effectively saying, "If we ignore the known health benefits of greater amounts of aerobic exercise, then greater amounts of aerobic exercise don't have any health benefits."
Companion post: Running: Gain, No Pain
Running: Gain, No Pain
No pain to speak of, leastways. And I've been at it over 38 years. Your mileage may vary, as does Malcolm Pollack's who, in his Pain, No Gain, reports:
I used to run. I never liked it much, but I did it anyway. I was never fleet of foot, and I never ran very far — two or three miles, usually, with the longest effort ever being only about six miles or so.
Mileage is indeed the key. Malcolm never ran far enough to experience what running is really about. He didn't take the first step. Arthur Lydiard, Run to the Top (2nd ed. Auckland: Minerva, 1967, p. 4):
The first step to enjoying running — and anyone will enjoy it if he takes that first step — is to achieve perfect fitness. I don't mean just the ability to run half a mile once a week without collapsing. I mean the ability to run great distances with ease at a steady speed.
That's one hell of a first step. But the great coach is right: you will never enjoy running or understand
its satisfactions if you jog around the block for 20 minutes four times per week. I find that only after one hour of running am I properly primed and stoked. And then the real run begins. Or as I recall Joe Henderson saying back in the '70s in a Runner's World column: Run the first hour for your body, the second for yourself.
I don't move very fast these days. I do the old man shuffle. But I've got staying power. Completed a marathon at age 60. Enjoyed the hell out of last week's 10 K Turkey Trot. Surprisingly, the satisfactions of running are the same now as they were in fleeter days.
To avoid injuries, limit your running to two or three days a week and crosstrain on the other days. I lift weights, ride bikes, use elliptical trainers, hike, swim, and do water aerobics.
And don't forget: LSD (long slow distance) is better than POT (plenty of tempo).
I Run, Therefore I Think
The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of running releases lofty (lüftig) thoughts. Running along the ground one ascends into the aether. Curro, ergo cogito.
If Boston is Athens, Hopkinton is Marathon
It is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the day of the 116th running of the Boston Marathon. It'll be a hot one with a predicted high of 84. The 26.2 miles exact a terrible toll on the mortal coil. Remember Pheidippides! who collapsed at the Athenian end of his run. It may have been Frank Shorter who quipped, at the 20-mile mark, "Why couldn't Pheidippides have died now?"
Will Boston Billy be running today?
Don’t Say ‘Turkey Day’
Say 'Thanksgiving' and give thanks. You don't need to eat turkey to be thankful. Gratitude is a good old conservative virtue. I'd expatiate further, but I've got a race to run. You guessed it: a 'turkey trot.' In Mesa, Arizona, 10 kilometers = 6.2 miles.
With only a couple of exceptions I've run this race every year since 1991. And now it's 2011. May the Grim Reaper, the Ultimate Repo Man, impart a spring to my step, and a glide to my stride. We take it to the limit. One more time.
The Frank Shorter Story
We who were swept up in the running boom of the 1970s for a lifetime of fitness and satisfaction owe a debt of gratitude to the runners and writers who popularized the sport. The four who stand out most prominently in my memory, 37 summers after I first took to the roads, are the running writers Jim Fixx and George Sheehan, and the world-class competitors Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter.
Shorter is often credited with being the father of the running boom due to his winning of Olympic gold at Munich in 1972 in the marathon. October's Runner's World features a lengthy piece on Shorter that tells of his triumphs but also of the physical and psychological abuse that he and his siblings received from their Jekyll-and-Hyde father.
Fat Ass Runs
That's what they are called, don't blame me. "FAT ASS is the name given to a series of low key runs that are frequented by experienced runners & walkers and characterised by the phrase 'No Fees, No Awards, No Aid, No Wimps.'" More here. Want to join me for Gold Canyon Fat Ass #1?